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When Instant Death Was Only A Step Away

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It's not until you look at the games of the past that you realise how easy the games of today really are.

Nearly every game these days has a "very easy" setting, some like Bayonetta - with its optional one-button mechanic - taking this to extremes. But in decades past, a lot of games prided themselves on their toughness. On how difficult they were to finish.

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And while some people will point to games like Contra as examples of this, today I'm going to show you something a little different. I'm going to show you what adventure games were like before Lucasarts revolutionised the genre.

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This is Space Quest 3. Before series like Monkey Island ruled adventure games' earth, Sierra's franchises - Police Quest, King's Quest and Space Quest to name a few - were top dogs. If you wanted a combination of puzzles and humour, Sierra is where you went.

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You also went there for brutal, instant death, which I think is the toughest, cruellest death of all in video games. If you were too slow to dodge a bullet, that's your own damn fault. But killing you instantly in a game for doing what seemed the right thing to do? That's cold. And it's something these old Sierra games excelled at.